Twitterpated

This week the tweetverse is all atwitter. The other day, a Twitter outage lasting several hours prevented users from accessing their accounts, leading one HuffingtonPost writer to pen a satirical obituary. According to Dan Abramson, the cause of death was “tentatively listed as ‘over capacity,’ though suspicion has fallen on the ill-tempered whale who first reported [it].” And Wednesday brought the intriguing news that the Times has banned the use of the word “tweet” in its articles. According to a memo circulated by standards editor Phil Corbett,

Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet”—as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter—is all three.

While the Times has often been a wee bit slow to embrace new terminologies, one wonders whether the paper has really thought this one through. If a word has become the standardized term for a procedure or action, as “tweet” certainly has, then it is difficult to determine what, if any, linguistic or grammatical harm results in its use. There is caution and then there is the preternatural caution that evokes undue literary disorientation or confusion.

Just as the medium was being rebuffed by one lauded institution this week, it was being embraced by another. In England this past weekend, the British comedian and master Twitterer Stephen Fry judged the Guardian Hay Festival’s first-ever “most beautiful tweet” contest. The contest, launched three weeks ago, was an effort by the festival’s organizers to locate “the wittiest tweet ever committed to the Twittersphere.” Last Sunday, amidst panels and lectures with writers including Martin Amis and Tom Stoppard, Fry announced the winner, a Canadian professor and medical physicist named Marc MacKenzie. MacKenzie’s winning tweet? “I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.” Anyone who was expecting eloquence on par with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” or even Spinal Tap’s “But it goes to eleven,” was surely disappointed. Fry, who has more than 1.5 million followers on Twitter, hailed MacKenzie’s tweet for highlighting “the ridiculousness of people saying ‘we need to build a new world.’ We are stuck with the world we have got.” I agree that MacKenzie’s tweet is certainly funny, but is it beautiful? A quick glance at Fry’s own tweets reveal a few which I dare say have a bit more frisson. Yet perhaps beauty is indeed in the eye of the tweeter. In an interview with the Guardian at the start of the festival, Peter Florence, the Hay’s founder and director, noted,

There are a lot of clever, inspiring and intuitive tweets from people taking a lot of care in their tweets. And when you do get a good one it does make you smile… Good writing is good whatever format it’s in.

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